The Day The Icecap Died

[phantom power]

A short story by Paul Briggs, with intro:

I started writing this story because, well, nobody else was doing it. Like a lot of people, I had read the projections of the Arctic Ocean having its first ice-free moment in human history some time in the 2020s.

Nobody seems to know what happens after that. The consensus seems to be that seasonal patterns of temperature and rainfall in the northern hemisphere will be altered in ways that will make many heavily populated parts of it much harder to survive in and seriously inconvenience anyone trying to grow crops, but no one can say exactly what this will look like.

So I decided to take a guess. I'm not a climatologist or anything, I'm just winging it.

I wrote this for alternatehistory.com, in the "Future History" section where only registered members could read it. Since it won the 2013 Turtledove Award for Best New Future, I thought I'd give it a little editing and share it with a wider audience.

September 11, 2021

Everyone knew it was going to happen sooner or later, but most people had expected it later in the decade, or perhaps early in the 2030s. It wasn’t until June and its record temperatures that everyone realized it was probably going to happen this year. Nobody saw the precise moment it happened.

Most people were thinking about something else — after all, this was the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. So it was a fairly minor story that when the next satellite overflew the poles, the last traces of sea ice floating in the Nares Strait and the Lincoln Sea were gone. From the Bering Strait to the Barents Sea, from the coast of Siberia to the labyrinth of channels between the Canadian islands, the Arctic Ocean was finally ice-free.

It stayed that way for three weeks.

(continued through the link)
http://paulbriggs.net/The_Day_The_Icecap_Died.php

[GliderGuider]

1. A good story, well written.

I read most of it on the bus to work this morning in the middle of a three-day deluge of rain here in Ottawa. It added a certain sense of realism to the experience...